On Being Retired

 Being retired in East TN without debt...   

While my advice is often ignored because I am not an expert at anything, my advice is to eliminate all debt before you retire...  it just makes bumps in the road easier to walk over.

If my wife and I want to LIVE LARGE, then we can expect to pay $5,000/month for that privilege...   If my wife and I want to LIVE BETTER THAN OK, then we can expect to pay $4,000/month for that privilege...   If we want to LIVE WITHIN OUR MEANS, then we can expect to pay $3,000/month for that privilege.  So, we live in the middle...

Living in the middle requires us to remove $1,000/month from our savings...  or $12,000/year...  or $120,000/decade...   and, if we plan to live two more decades then we need $240,000 saved.  If those years increase to 3 decades, the the amount would be $360,000...

If our mortgage free house is worth $300,000 then we really only need about $100,000 in our savings accounts...

Our East TN home is in a very quiet community and we have an acre of land and a riding lawn mower.  Our house is about 1,500 square feet with another $1,500 square foot full basement that is divided into thirds with a living area, storage, and garage.  Our house is really bigger than we need.

In the back yard, we have a 26 foot round above ground pool, a hot spring hot tub, and a 12 foot pentagon shaped gazebo, all of which is surrounded by a deck.  We have a front porch, a screen-in back porch, 4 bedrooms, 3 full baths, an open kitching, dining, and living room, and adequate storage space.  Under the back porch is another closed in storage area.

Our neighborhood is crime free but we still lock our doors.  We walk around the community for exercise but not after the sun goes down.  In the warm months we spend most of our time ourside.

The first 5 years of our retirement, we traveled somewhere every other month for a week, but after 60 month we decided we had enough traveling.  So we just go to MB,SC twice and stay at home the rest of the time.  We eat out twice a week, a nd do pretty much whatever we want to do without any fears of running out of money.

We have cell phones but no land line.  We have WIFI fiber to the Internet and subscribe to Hulu, Netflix, and Prime through our ROKU device.  Cable sucked and we don't plan to go back.

Politics bothers us both but we are too old to give a shit anymore other than piss and moan to each other about it.  Inflation has not really bothered us as just getting older.

We both stay busy everyday and never get bored wishing we had something to do...

What's best of all about being retired is that you kiss nobody's ass anymore...

Understand

 

Connection

 

Drummers and AI

Clyde Stubblelfield

There’s a moment five minutes into ‘Funky Drummer’ (1970), an instrumental jam by James Brown, when the clouds part and Clyde Stubblefield is left alone. We can hear on the recording Brown instructing his band to ‘give the drummer some’. He tells Stubblefield not to solo, but to ‘just keep what you got’. Even if you’ve never heard the original, you will have heard Stubblefield’s drum break. The looped sample has been used on more than a thousand other tunes. His right hand is playing semiquavers on the hi-hats throughout, with his left foot opening the cymbals to produce an occasional offbeat whisper. His right foot on the bass drum and left hand on the snare are in a conversation. The backbeats on the second and fourth beat of each bar are decorated with what drummers call ‘ghost notes’ on the snare drum, more felt than heard.

In principle, it would be perfectly possible to take each semiquaver, transcribe it, pull the notes from the stave, use readily available software to program them into a grid and fully automate the funky drummer. The beat is repetitive. Drumming is all about patterns, and computers are very, very good with patterns. And yet there is something ineffably human about this performance. The dance of his limbs, the bounce of his sticks and the movement of the air inside his drums combine to produce something undeniably musical. I think a drum machine couldn’t get close. But maybe not everyone cares as much as I do about the nuances of percussion.  READ MORE...

The Charge of Speeding

 

Contentment

 

China Demands Military Upgrade

China's President Xi Jinping, bottom center, arrives for the second plenary session of the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 7, 2023. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on his nation's military to bolster its strength to "world-class standards."

Xi made the comment Wednesday in a speech before the National People's Congress — China's highest legislative body.

Xi told the Congress of Chinese Communist Party members that the nation must bolster its "national strategic capabilities" in order to "systematically upgrade the country’s overall strength to cope with strategic risks, safeguard strategic interests and realize strategic objectives."

China's President Xi Jinping, bottom center, arrives for the second plenary session of the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 7, 2023. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)

The comments reflect a growing concern within the Chinese government that its relations with the U.S. could come to confrontational head.

The Chinese government will boost its military spending by 7.2% this year, rising to a total budget of 1.56 trillion yuan.

In U.S. dollars, China's budget now sits at $230 billion, up nearly $16 billion from its budget in 2022. China's Ministry of Finance announced the new infusion of cash in its annual report on Sunday.  READ MORE...

Take Care of DOgs

 

Rule

 

Understanding

 

Capitalism Kisses China's BUTT

The Chinese Consumer Markets total 1.412  BILLION...

FACTS

1. The  United States Consumer Markets total  0.3 MILLION...
2. ESPN is the largest broadcaster of sports in the USA
3. DISNEY owns ESPN
4. DISNEY is WOKE
5. NIKE is the largest seller of sports tennis shoes
6. NIKE is WOKE
7. ESPN, DISNEY, and NIKE  will do anything to get the Chinese Consumer Market

NOTE:  What would you do if you were an  upped manaement executive with ESPN, DISNEY, or NIKE...

• Cater to  the US market of 0.3 MILLION
• Cater to the Chinese market of 1.412 BILLION

Personally and to keep my job, I believe I would focus on the second option...  but, that is just me...  and, I am no marketing expert of upper management executive...

QUESS WHAT AMERICANS?

You are buying into and supporting this nonsense...  corparate  America does not give a rat's ass are the American consumer...  not with China out there ready to  put the American marketplace in second place...

INDIA, has the next largest population after China...   1.408  BILLION

Do you think that CORPORATE AMERICA will  try to acquire the INDIAN market after China?

If they do, then the American market slides down the THIRD PLACE...

What a minute...

The population of the European Union is  447 MILLION...  a little higher than the USA of 300 MILLION...

That puts us in FOURTH PLACE...

We are just talking sports here...  since sports has the highest marketshare  of what is currently being sold...

What about the influnce of FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, AMAZON, and TWITTER?

What about the influence of CNN ,   ABC, NBC, CBS, AND PBR?

First Society

 

Fat Cat

 

MInd Control

 

US Military Secrets Stolen by China

US F-22 on keft...   Chinese J-20 on right

China achieved its fifth-generation fighter jet by copying U.S. military tech, and it could maintain its pacing challenge for the American military if more isn’t done to safeguard sensitive weapons information, experts tell Fox News Digital.

"What we know is that because of the espionage efforts, [China’s] J-20 is more advanced than it otherwise would be, and that's the important point here," former Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Anderson said in an interview.

"They have profited greatly from their thievery over the years," he said. "They've put it to good use, and they've come up with an advanced fifth-generation fighter," noting that it’s "hard to say, short of actual combat," how the J-20 matches up against the U.S. F-22 Raptor fighter.


China began developing its J-20 in 2008 as part of a plan to design a new fighter that could compete with those in America. The plane first took flight in 2011, with its introduction to service in 2017.

In 2015, reports on the plane’s technology and capabilities started to notice similarities between it and U.S. fighter jets, with an Associated Press report stating that "some of its technology, it turns out, may well have come from the U.S. itself."

Now China has a fifth-generation stealth fighter, similar to the U.S. F-22, which has further closed what was once a virtually insurmountable gap between the two militaries in terms of technological capabilities – all thanks to continued intellectual property theft. The gap between U.S. and Chinese military technology has received renewed focus as tensions between the two nations continue to increase and officials continue to discuss a possible invasion of Taiwan, which might include a U.S. military response.  READ MORE...

Just Answer the Question...

 

Past - Present - Future

 

A Ticking Time Bomb

After Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell indicated the bank isn’t finished raising rates, one market expert has warned a crash could come in a matter of days.

"They're playing catch up, and while they were doing quantitative easing in 2021, inflation started to rage and now they're trying to catch up," The Bear Traps Report founder Larry McDonald said on "Mornings with Maria" Wednesday.

"Our 21 Lehman systemic risk indicators that look at equity and credit point to one of the highest probabilities of a crash in the stock market looking out 60 days," McDonald who is also known for writing a best-selling book on the Lehman Brothers collapse cautioned.

The withdrawal of capital from middle-class families has been "spectacular," McDonald argued, as the Fed continues its most aggressive rate hike campaign since the 1980s to crush decades-high inflation. Although the consumer price index has slowly fallen from a high of 9.1% notched last June, it remains about three times higher than the pre-pandemic average.

On Tuesday, Powell stressed on Capitol Hill that the central bank policymakers are prepared to pick up the pace of rate increases, as they’re expecting to go higher than previously thought.  READ MORE...

Manipulated

 

CO2